It Is However A Quite Different Story If We Take Malthus To Be An Advocate

It is however a quite different story if we take Malthus to be an advocate of particular policies of public health or social reform. The question then does not seem to be whether or not Malthus was guided by his moral convictions in formulating his views on these matters, as he inevitably was, but whether his view of history should justifiably tell us anything about the way in which we should organise our society. The question resonates deeply with contemporary philosophical debates of which Malthus must have been keenly aware. Only some years before David Hume took issue with the view that we can infer the future from things past. There can be no doubt that to a certain degree Malthus is guilty of committing the mistake of extrapolating from past developments a picture of a desirable future state of British society. But let us in all fairness look at his claims in detail. In outlining his main arguments I will use a distinction made by Hamlin which I believe structures the field of interpretation in a helpful way and separates the contentious issues from the non-contentious ones.
Hamlin focuses first of all on Malthus's core argument which is of descriptive nature in his statement of the population principle. As a purely descriptive proposition it must fail to invite criticism of ethical subterfuge. (Hamlin 2000, p.117). The principle of population can be summarised in three aspects. Firstly, Malthus believes to have shown that the 'population cannot increase without the means of subsistence, second, that population invariably increases when the means of subsistence are available, and third that 'the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice' (Winch 1987, p.19)
Here Malthus works with two (mainly speculative) assumptions: first, that man's drive to procreation is infinitely greater than the earth's potential to produce subsistence. And second, that the sexual impulses of man are stable over history. Malthus illustrates the first postulate by contrasting the arithmetic power of subsistence to the geometric growth in population. The disparity between the two had been pointed out previously by other commentators, and critics have accordingly accused Malthus of plagiarism (Hazlitt 1994a, p.171). But it would only be fair to Malthus to mention that he never claimed to be the discoverer of this relation between the two different ratios (Hazlitt 1994a, p.171). Although Malthus attempts to support his calculations about the necessary divergence of the two ratios with some available figures on population growth and grain production in the past, his argument which links the two remains speculative.